The Dressmaker's Gift

by Valpy, Fiona

  As the summer wore on, conditions became more and more unbearable in the barracks. The stench of the nearby latrine block mingled with the smell of sickness and decay which hung heavy on the air in the oppressive hut. The overcrowded bunks crawled with fleas and lice, which feasted on the wasted bodies of the prisoners. Infected bites became festering sores, and every morning the hut’s senior would select a couple of the more able women to carry the bodies of fever-ridden inmates to the hospital block. Some mornings, for some of the women, it was too late: their corpses would be removed, wordlessly and unceremoniously, by the prisoners whose job it was to pull a handcart to the crematorium where the chimney cast its pall of grey smoke over the camp from dawn until dusk each day.

  In the textile factory, the noise and the heat were merciless. One day, when the foreman’s back was turned, Claire managed to smuggle a pair of scissors from her workbench back to the hut. That evening, she cut off her hair. As the pale strands fell to the floor around her feet, she experienced a searing pang of shame. She remembered pinning up the blonde lengths in front of the mirror in her room, wearing the midnight blue gown with the silver beads, preparing to go and meet Ernst on that New Year’s Eve so long ago. Her need to feel loved, to enjoy the sense of luxury and plenty that she’d so craved, had been her downfall, bringing her here, in the end, to this living hell. She hacked viciously at her hair and angry tears ran down her face.

  Then Vivi appeared at her side and took the scissors from her. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘I’m here. We’re still together.’ She wrapped her arms around Claire’s shaking shoulders and whispered in her ear, ‘Don’t cry. You know the ones who cry are the ones who have given up. We won’t ever give up, you and I.’

  Then Vivi had handed back the scissors and said, ‘Cut my hair off, too.’ She’d turned to face the rest of the hut, summoning up a smile. ‘Who else would like to join us? It’s cooler, and it’ll make it much easier to comb out the lice.’ A queue of women had formed of those who still had their hair, and afterwards they helped one another to clean their shorn heads. The differentiation between those who’d had their heads shaved and those who hadn’t was erased. And to Claire, it seemed that the stench and the degradation seemed a little less pervasive that evening, displaced by a sense of camaraderie that had flickered into life.

  1944

  The city froze that January. It was one of the coldest Mireille could remember, and now that supplies of food and coal were at their lowest ebb she felt that her body and her mind had frozen as well. She sleepwalked through her days in the sewing room, wrapped in a blanket as she tried to stitch together the pieces of the few items that were still being ordered. Many of the girls had left the atelier. Some – the Jewish girls and one or two others – had simply disappeared, as Claire and Vivi had done. Others had decided to go back and struggle to survive with their families in the more rural areas, where at least there was a chance to grow a little food.

  The temptation to go home was strong, but Mireille knew she couldn’t leave Paris, even if she had been able to get a pass to travel. Applying for one would draw attention to herself. In any case, she had to stay, for the sake of the fugitives that she sheltered in the attic rooms in the Rue Cardinale and for the sake of her friends, Claire and Vivi. She had no idea whether or not they were still alive, but she knew she had to keep going, keep hoping that one day they would return.

  She left the apartment as seldom as possible, and curled up in her blankets when the air raid sirens sounded and she heard the distant roar of the bombers overhead. She often wondered whether ‘Fréd’ was in one of the planes and tried to give herself courage by imagining that he was, that he knew she was there and that he was guiding his bombs away from Saint-Germain, keeping her safe.

  Monsieur Leroux brought her news, occasionally, of the war beyond her country’s borders. The German forces were stretched thinner than ever now, and the privations that they’d inflicted on the countries they’d occupied were biting them too. The Allies were stronger than ever, making advances. Surely, he said, if the tide continued to turn like this, the war couldn’t go on much longer . . .

  She tried hard to hold on to his words, even though when she studied his face it was gaunt and twisted with anguish, belying his underlying sense of desperation.

  She had often mulled over what he’d said that day when he’d come to tell her that Vivi and Claire had left the prison and been taken to a camp in the east. ‘I love them both, Mireille.’ What had he meant by that? What was his relationship with Vivi, and what were his feelings for Claire? Could he love them both, equally?

  One evening, after she’d settled the family of refugees that she was sheltering for the night in their bedrooms, she joined him where he sat at the table in the sitting room.

  For a moment they were both silent. And then she said, ‘I wonder what they are doing now.’ There was no need for her to say their names; they both knew who she was referring to.

  ‘I tell myself every day that they are doing what we are doing. Staying alive, keeping going, waiting for the day we can be together again. I think we have to tell ourselves that. It’s what gives us a reason to carry on.’

  She tried to read the expression in his eyes, but the depth of his pain obscured everything else. ‘Vivi . . .’ she began, but stopped, unable to find the right words to ask him what she wanted to know.

  He studied her face for a moment. And then he said, his voice breaking with emotion, ‘Vivi is my sister.’

  All at once it made sense. Their closeness. The way they smiled at each other. But also the way she’d seen him looking at Claire, sometimes. He really did love them both. But in very different ways. The pain in his eyes made sense now, too.

  He’d lost his sister as well as the woman he was falling in love with. And he blamed himself.

  The cold would have killed the women in the hut, its icy fingers freezing the blood in their veins, had there not been so many of them crammed on to each bunk. In winter, the fleas and lice bit less, which meant there were fewer deaths from typhus, but influenza and pneumonia stepped into the breach to continue the brutal, remorseless harvest of lives through the camp. Weakened by near-starvation and despair, few of the camp’s inmates had the resources to put up much of a fight.

  One evening, when they arrived back from the factory, the hut senior drew Vivi and Claire aside. ‘They are asking for more women who can sew, to work in the reception centre. There are so many more people to process these days, they’ve brought in extra sewing machines. I’ve put your names on the list.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Vivi. Over the months they’d spent in the camp, she’d told Claire to bring back any odds and ends from the factory whenever she could, to give to the senior, as Vivi herself did too, cementing them into her good books. Everything had value – a handful of buttons, a needle and thread, some scraps of material. At last the gifts had paid off, buying the two of them their places in the relative warmth and safety of the reception centre.

  And so the next morning, instead of trudging along the snow-packed track to the factory, they walked a few hundred yards to the huddle of buildings beside the gates to the camp. As they went, Claire blew on her hands, trying to stop her fingers from freezing. ‘I wonder who’ll take over our jobs in the factory,’ she mused aloud.

  Vivi began to speak, but the cold air caught in her lungs, making her whole body convulse as she coughed. When she found her voice again, she said, ‘Well, I hope whoever takes over my machine doesn’t discover that I set it to make the toes and heels of the socks thinner instead of reinforcing them. I reckon there’ll be quite a few German soldiers with very sore feet by now. That’s been my most recent contribution to the war effort!’ For a moment, her hazel eyes flashed with a little of their old spark, and Claire couldn’t help laughing. The sound was like music in the frozen air, a sound so unusual that it made the prisoners walking a few yards ahead of them turn and stare. In the nearest guard tower, the barrel of a machine gun
swung in their direction and Claire quickly stifled her mouth with her hand.

  Vivi coughed again, and her breath turned into little clouds above her head which froze into droplets of ice, weaving themselves into her halo of short, russet curls. A ray of low winter sunshine illuminated her for a moment and Claire was struck by how beautiful her friend looked in that moment, as out of place in the drab surroundings of the camp as a ruby nestling in a heap of rags.

  Mireille could sense that the German grip on Paris had begun to weaken. There were fewer soldiers on leave, these days, sitting at the cafés and restaurants along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and more and more military convoys leaving the city, heading northwards.

  Monsieur Leroux arrived at the apartment one evening in June, carrying a large box. He set it down on the table in the sitting room with a flourish. ‘Voilà! A present for you, Mireille.’ She opened the box to find a wireless radio set.

  A year ago she might have felt a qualm of fear at having such a thing under her roof, but now it represented a small freedom.

  Once he had plugged it in and positioned the aerial correctly, a voice filled the room. At first she could scarcely grasp what the announcer was saying.

  ‘What does he mean?’ she asked Monsieur Leroux. ‘What is this “Operation Overlord”?’

  His eyes shone with a look of hope which had been absent for such a very long time. ‘The Allies have landed on the beaches of Normandy, Mireille. This is it. The big push! They are fighting on French soil.’

  Every evening after that, she would hurry back upstairs from the sewing room once the working day was over and switch on the radio to listen to the latest news from the BBC and the Free French broadcaster, Radiodiffusion Nationale. The voices filled the room with bulletins announcing the latest advances as, town by town, the Allies clawed France back from German control. And as she listened, those same voices seemed to fill her heart with fresh hope. She began to let herself believe, again, that there would be an end to the war; that she would be able to see her family soon; that Claire and Vivi would come home; and that maybe – just maybe – out there somewhere the young Free French airman, whose name she whispered at night in the silence of her darkened room, was fighting his way back to free the city where she sat waiting, in limbo, for her life to begin again.

  Slowly but surely a new tone of defiance crept into the voices coming through the radio, until, at last, the tide turned.

  It was a hot August afternoon and Mademoiselle Vannier had sent the few remaining seamstresses home early. There was so little work these days and only one team remained, working on the increasingly sporadic orders that came in. More often than not, the salon downstairs remained closed, the blinds drawn over the plate glass windows embellished with the name Delavigne Couture.

  Mireille flung open the windows of the apartment to try and encourage a breath of early evening air to cool the overheated attic rooms, and then she turned on the radio. As she poured herself a glass of water in the kitchen, the announcer’s words drew her back to listen more closely.

  ‘Let us put an end to these convoys,’ the voice urged. ‘Yesterday another thousand or more men and women were sent east. And today we say “Enough!” Enough of our countrymen have disappeared to the German work camps. It’s time for them to be allowed to come home now. Citizens of Paris, it’s time to put an end to this. The Métro workers, the gendarmes and the police have come out on strike. We call on all other citizens to join them in a wider act of resistance. Rise up now and let us take back our city!’

  As if in response to the call to arms, she heard the sound of gunfire from the direction of the river, followed by the dull thud of an explosion somewhere further to the north. There were shouts on the street below, and the sound of running feet seemed to replicate the throbbing of her pounding heart.

  She felt an overwhelming urge to be part of it, whatever it was that was happening out there . . . Without stopping to think, she ran down the metal stairs and out on to the Rue Cardinale. The tall buildings hemmed her in on the narrow street and so, instinctively, she turned and headed for the river’s more open vistas.

  A group of young men marched briskly towards the Pont Neuf, carrying whatever arms they’d managed to procure from who-knew-where. More men emerged from the cellars and the attics of the buildings along the quayside, waiters and clerks and policemen: Resistance fighters all.

  Mireille hesitated in the shade of a plane tree, unsure which way to go. At the end of the bridge, men and women were setting up barricades, dragging anything they could find to pile up across the road. Two men began cutting down one of the trees that flanked the entrance to the bridge, hacking desperately into it with axes.

  Mireille ran to help a group that was levering up paving stones, adding them to the growing defences. Her hands bled as she clawed at the mortar holding a slab in place, prising a corner loose until the stone was freed and she could stagger to the barricade with it.

  ‘Look out!’ a man shouted, as the tree began to topple, and she leapt clear as it fell.

  Just then, a German armoured car swept towards them across the bridge, spitting machine-gun fire. Bullets ricocheted off the stonework as the Résistants returned fire, and the man dragged Mireille down to crouch behind the fallen tree as a bullet embedded itself into the trunk beside her. The armoured car swerved and then careened off along the quai in the opposite direction. The man grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet. ‘Go home, miss,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe out here on the streets. The city is a battleground now. Get yourself back inside.’ At the far end of the bridge, a German tank lumbered into view, its gun barrel swinging menacingly towards the barricades. ‘Hurry! Go now, while you can.’ He pushed her towards the Rue Dauphine and she ran, stumbling, towards the shelter of the narrow streets of the rive gauche. As she fled, she glanced back over her shoulder at the tank as it advanced on the barricades, where one of the fighters lay, at the end of the bridge, in a pool of bright blood.

  Back in the apartment, the radio was still filling the empty rooms with its tirade, urging the citizens to retake the city. She flung herself down on to the chair, gasping for breath, and sat listening late into the night to the voices from afar and the closer patter of gunfire, as the battle for Paris raged on.

  In the camp, they were used to ‘selections’ being made almost every day. Prisoners were marched away or herded into buses to be transported to and from the many other satellite camps that dotted the region. Some came back to report where they’d been, but others never returned.

  At roll call one morning, when the other prisoners marched off to the factories for the day, Claire and Vivi were ordered to remain behind, along with a number of other women. Claire risked a glance at the others left standing on the dusty square in front of the huts. One or two looked afraid, not knowing where they might be sent next and what fate awaited them there. But most just stood with their eyes cast downwards, scarcely able to care. Vivi caught her eye and smiled, encouragingly.

  ‘Eyes forward,’ snapped the guard.

  The women stood, swaying in the summer sun that beat down on their shaven heads protected only by thin cotton headscarves, until at last they were ordered to begin walking. The bedraggled, starving line of women filed out through the gates of the camp and followed the guards to the train station, where a line of trucks was drawn up alongside the platform.

  ‘Please God, not again,’ Claire prayed, remembering the long, slow journey that had brought them to Flossenbürg in the first place. A guard pulled open the heavy sliding door of one of the trucks and at first Claire couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Slowly, squinting against the strong sunlight, in the darkness inside the wooden carriage she made out a tangled heap of blue and white striped cloth and pale limbs. Dark eyes gazed up at her, sunk into skull-like faces. And then she realised that these were women. The stench of death made her cover her nose and mouth, as the guard hastily pulled the door shut again.

  ‘Next carria
ge,’ shouted an SS officer, waving them further down the platform. In silence, the women climbed into the empty cattle truck that awaited them. The wooden door rolled closed, shutting out the light, and a few minutes later the train lurched forward.

  The battle for Paris raged through the streets of the city for four days. Mireille listened to the radio broadcasts as reports came in that the Resistance fighters had occupied the Grand Palais and were coming under fire from German troops. Skirmishes were breaking out all across the city but, at the same time, columns of German vehicles had been seen moving down the Champs-Élysées, retreating eastwards.

  The next night, the pitch of the broadcasts changed again, becoming even more frenzied. ‘Take heart, citizens of Paris!’ cried the announcer, ‘the Second French Armoured Division is on its way. A vanguard is at the Porte d’Italie right now. Rise up and fight to take back your country!’

  From the road below came the sound of running feet and volleys of shots.

  But then she heard something else. She pushed her feet into her shoes and ran downstairs, hurrying towards the river again for the first time since she’d helped build the barricades on the Pont Neuf. She joined a growing flood of people taking to the streets of their city and, one by one, they added their voices to the song.

  ‘La Marseillaise’ rang through the streets as French and Spanish troops, in American tanks and trucks, opened fire on the German fortifications.

  When they’d boarded the train at Flossenbürg, Claire and Vivi hadn’t known where they were being taken, or how long the journey would last. But after just a few hours’ jolting progress, the train jerked to a halt.

  The women lifted their bowed heads at the sound of shouted commands and then they heard the cattle-car doors being pulled back. At last their own carriage was opened and they helped one another down, blinking in the evening sunshine. They turned their faces away from the piles of bodies that were being unloaded from further up the train and stacked beside the railway tracks. Male prisoners in the ubiquitous striped uniforms were loading the corpses on to handcarts and wheeling them away.